Remember when they held your hand while you drew your first stroke in kindergarten? Those were the good old days. But they don’t do it anymore in startups, corporate, and businesses.
Well, 80/20 of SEO is that hand-holding.
We – Ishaan and the folks at Spear Growth – created this guide to help anyone and everyone rethink SEO.
Why? Because most marketing folks or founders think SEO is some magic wand. They’ll wave it, drive traffic, get conversions, and voila – they made a fortune.
(Spoiler: Our RevOps Manager, Siya, thought so too—until Ishaan set the record straight!)
SEO success stories over the years.
Spear Growth is almost 4 years old, and we’ve made huge breakthroughs in B2B SaaS with SEO. Like:
Our goal? Get SQLs. No vanity metrics. We decided to open-source some of the 80/20 things we did for B2B SaaS companies to get results like these.
Why full-time SEOs rarely rise to the CMO role
In 2020, Ishaan asked a question in the PEAK community, which had about 300 members, mostly CMOs.
“How many CMOs do you know that were full-time SEOs in their career?”
Out of the ~40 responses he got, only one person knew of a single CMO who had been an SEO. The other 39? They knew none.
This matched Ishaan’s own experience perfectly. That’s why he started the survey in the first place.
But why is this the case?
Long ago in a forest, there lived a witch who couldn’t rank on Google… Just kidding!
The real reason is that SEO is extremely broad. Not just for you reading this—for SEOs actually doing it every day.
Ishaan can teach a marketer how to handle ads in 2-3 weeks, and they’ll be decent at it.
But SEO? That takes about 2 years just to be average.
SEO is very complex. There are 10-50 things to learn in each area: tech SEO, content strategy, and backlinking.
And each area is very different. You need to know a bit about coding, operations, content creation, and analytics. Even after all that, you need to be great at working with different teams, which requires executive skills. Plus, the feedback in SEO is slow and sometimes doesn’t exist. Good mentors? Rarely find them in SEO.
In short, it’s hard to even be average at SEO.
And since it’s not the most fun or exciting area for most marketers, many start here and get lost. Another problem is that even after all this effort, you might still end up being a so-so SEO. You learn to follow checklists and do things because they “should” be done. Not because they will bring results.
See how this, culturally, sounds exactly the opposite of the skills a good CMO needs?
Over the years, we’ve conducted 10+ rounds of hiring to add SEOs to our team. The sad reality is that in more than half of these rounds, we end up rejecting all candidates.
The skills needed to excel at SEO are very different from those needed to be a successful CMO. CMOs need to see the big picture, make strategic decisions, and drive business results. SEOs, on the other hand, often get bogged down in the details, focusing on technicalities and checklists.
This mismatch is why you rarely see SEOs making the leap to the CMO role. It’s not because they lack talent or effort. It’s because the skills and mindset required are fundamentally different.
The disconnect between CMOs and SEO teams
Ishaan got on a call with a senior marketing leadership of a fortune 100 company.
“I am so frustrated!”
“By what?”
“I just can’t talk to my SEO team. ”
“What do you mean?”
“I give them MQL targets, and ask them what they’ll need to accomplish it. They can’t respond.
I ask them what’s the progress on MQLs. They tell me they got backlinks and added canonical tags.
They seem to be doing something, but I don’t know how I can even speak with them!”
This is very common. SEOs and CMOs speak different languages.
Neither of them knows how to bridge the gap. And to truly bridge the gap, both sides need to create a common language.
The Trust Deficit in SEO
At Spear Growth, we offer two services: ads and SEO.
The sales calls for these services differ by a LOT.
Think about this: On ad sales calls, almost all the prospects mention their SQL targets. Nobody ever tells us to do keyword research, manage bids, or set up conversion tracking. Which makes sense. We’re the experts—give us the targets, and we’ll tell you how we’ll achieve them.
But on SEO sales calls, it’s a different story. Prospects tell us they want 10 backlinks a month, post 2 blogs a week, and increase the page speed score to X.
It’s almost insulting. Both to them and us.
They can’t trust SEO agencies. But It’s not their fault. It’s ours (SEOs).
If you’ve spoken with SEO agencies or even internal teams, you’ll quickly realize that they shouldn’t or can’t trust SEOs. SEOs haven’t given CMOs a reason to trust them.
SEO Budget Allocation
For every other marketing channel, you put in more budget to get more results. You invest directly in ads, campaigns, and promotions, and you see a direct correlation between spend and outcomes.
But for SEO, the allocation is scattered.
You’re putting more budget into:
Budget allocation is fragmented.
The feedback loop between results and effort is long and often non-existent.
SEOs can’t bridge the gap between SEO work and investment.
So…
Yeah…
CMOs allocate a budget but frankly it’s not deployed very well.
Why CMOs Struggle with Control and Clarity
~40% of CMOs’ targets come from SEO, yet they have little control over the levers to pull.
Before launching Spear Growth, Ishaan used to lead SEO for a B2B SaaS unicorn.
He built the SEO function there from scratch.
By senior leadership, he was asked to:
If you get traffic from blogs ranking for keywords like “leadership offsite plan” or “applicant rejection template,” you cannot possibly “do CRO” and turn this traffic into MQLs and SQLs.
Sounds like a great structured plan, right? The problem is that it’s fundamentally flawed.
If you get traffic from blogs ranking for keywords like “leadership offsite plan” or “applicant rejection template” you cannot possibly “do CRO” and turn this traffic into MQLs and SQLs..
Why? The intent behind these keywords ≠ your sales goals.
No matter how much CRO you do—optimizing landing pages, adding CTAs, tweaking forms—you won’t convert this type of traffic into meaningful leads. The traffic doesn’t have the right intent. Not all traffic is created equal.
This issue is compounded by blogs from agencies and tools claiming that SEO takes a year to show results. They say you’ll see traffic growth and then it’ll magically turn into conversions. Absolute BS.
At Spear Growth, our clients see MQLs within 4 weeks of implementation consistently.
Making decisions for SEO is even more difficult because standard marketing reporting doesn’t help anyone make decisions either.
Here’s a screenshot of one slide of the kind of reporting we do for our clients, which helps them actually take decisions:
Want to see a sample report so you can replicate it for yourself? Reach out to udayan@speargrowth.com.
The way SEO works for B2B SaaS
There are 3 types of 💩ty strategies companies commonly use:
💩 Strategy 1: Relying on Checklists…
💩 Strategy 2: Relying on tools…
💩 Strategy 3: Following influencers blindly…
All three only work because you do so much work that you get lucky enough times. But if you don’t get lucky, you won’t see a growth in SQLs.
Either way, you’re wasting time, money, and focus.
What works isn’t something revolutionary but a simple first principles-based approach to SEO.
Want to bring in SQLs?
In a quarter, don’t do everything you can do for SEO. Prioritize the two most important “things” to do in a quarter.
If only someone could write a guide in under 500 words to help you understand what these “things” are. Oh wait, that’s what we did.
The SEO guide for CMOs in 441 words
There are a few key parts of SEO:
When to Do Things Differently:
Then there are a few times you need to do things differently:
Yes, I know this is the best SEO article you’ve ever read. As true marketers, here’s our sales pitch offer to you. 🙂
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These are the things you need to do SEO well.
Finally, this is what you need for the implementation to actually happen:
Ishaan’s rant. (Feel free to skip)
The channel is called organic search. 🙂
SEO is the act of optimizing it.
Also… SEO isn’t a job title.
SEO executive is.
This section was just for Ishaan to rant a little. Lol.